The Digiday Podcast

The media and marketing industries seem to be approaching another inflection point. The delta variant is beginning to put the brakes on the return to normal that had been underway since the start of the year. That makes mid-August — already a typically slower part of the year — an opportune time to catch up on the top trends of the ever-changing moment.In this week’s Digiday Podcast, co-hosts Kayleigh Barber and Tim Peterson talk about the delta that marketers and media companies are finding themselves in. Spring’s stability has given way to a summer of uncertainty, cracking open the question of how businesses will fare in the fall. Fortunately, the swings of the past year and a half has positioned companies well for this state of flux.The conversation spans the status of companies’ plans to return to the office and host in-person events, the advertising rebound that businesses have experienced this year, how companies continue to build up their commerce businesses, publishers’ shifting subscription strategies as retention becomes the priority and the latest wave of media consolidation.

Travel, to no surprise, was one of the largest industries impacted by the pandemic and publishers like Atlas Obscura that cover exploration, wanderlust and gastronomy had to quickly adapt and figure out both what content output and brand deals would like in this new reality. Luckily for Atlas Obscura, the concept of exploration meant more than its tourism and trip-planning business, which accounted for about half of the company’s revenue in 2019. In the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast, CEO Warren Webster talked about how his team adapted exploration to mean everything from learning about new subjects or trying out new skills from experts online in a new courses business, as well as leaning into the road trip model for discovering a new place. And while some travel-related advertisers had to pull back on spending, others in the auto and food categories filled the gaps and Atlas Obscura walked away from 2020 in a strong position, Webster said, though he did not provide exact figures. Now as travel is slowly returning, the company is bringing back some of its paused 2019 revenue streams and adding its successful 2020 innovations to build toward a successful year.Of course, some hesitations still loom around the coronavirus variants, but Webster said that both his team and advertisers are optimistic and eager to get back into in-person experiential events and programming.

Good Housekeeping set a standard at Hearst UK that the rest of the portfolio wants to replicate.For nearly 100 years, the homelife magazine has cultivated a following of readers who trust its product recommendations, reviews and seals of approval enough to spend their money on those tried and tested items. Now, the Good Housekeeping Institute has expanded into the Hearst Institute, enabling the rest of the UK-based titles to use the same resources, experts and testing facility that has strengthened the GH brand's trust with readers.In the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast, Laura Cohen, Hearst UK’s head of accreditation, talks about what the expansion means for both the physical operations of the Hearst Institute as well as its ability to drive revenue from working with more brands and producing more content that can be monetized through affiliate commerce.

Yahoo is on a mission to drive brand affinity across its portfolio by turning casual readers into fanatics who are willing to spend money with the media company.That strategy has led the company to experiment with new mediums and types of content, as well as new innovative partnerships, said Joanna Lambert, head of consumer at Yahoo. In the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast, she said she wants to reach 900 million monthly, paying users by further enticing them with shoppable videos, online sports betting partnerships, cross-brand content offerings, and more.Lambert and her team now has more to work with: in May, Verizon Media was sold to private equity firm Apollo for $5 billion, in a deal that would make the suite of brands — including the Yahoo portfolio, Techcrunch, Engadget, In The Know and others — renamed to Yahoo. This deal has yet to close, so Lambert did not speak much about it, but did say that as a remaining 10% stakeholder in the new media company, Verizon will remain a partner on 5G projects, which has been a large focus for innovation, she said.

Many athletes have made moves into the media business, from Derek Jeter with The Players’ Tribune to LeBron James with Uninterrupted and SpringHill Entertainment to Alex Morgan, Sue Bird, Chloe Kim and Simone Manuel with TOGETHXR. That list also includes Kevin Durant.Through their company Thirty Five Ventures, the NBA star and his business partner Rich Kleiman have been building a media business that has evolved from a channel on YouTube and show on ESPN+ into a media company called The Boardroom.“Boardroom was an evolution of us wanting to have a voice, knowing we had a voice but wanting to have our take and our point of view on the sports world and on what was happening in the culture around the sports world,” Kleiman said in the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast.

Architectural Digest’s global editorial director Amy Astley does not want the 100-year-old magazine to feel stuck in a legacy mindset.While print subscriptions are still an increasing area of the business, she said, the brand’s digital presence and social media content have become significant ways for AD to grow a much younger and more diverse audience. Enter global digital director David Kaufman, who was brought on last year as a way to further the publication’s international expansion and global integration.Now Astley and Kaufman are working together to create a larger audience, using all of the channels in their arsenal, including YouTube and Instagram, to fill the funnel of new viewers who have the potential to become subscribers, or become online shoppers as AD continues to build out its shoppable video and content.In the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast, the pair discusses why the pandemic led to new opportunities for experimentation, like launching new content verticals and building out its commerce business and leaning further into platforms frequented by Gen Z and millennials.

NBC News’s “Meet the Press” is the longest-running show on TV. For the program to remain relevant in the streaming era, it needs to appeal to people who are not tuning in to traditional TV. This notion is not lost on the show’s host Chuck Todd, who also anchors “Meet the Press Reports,” a streaming-only series that debuted on NBCUniversal’s Peacock in September.However, Todd also saw an opportunity to seize streaming as a means of stretching beyond the limitations of a linear time slot and doing deeper coverage of topics like voting rights and climate change.“It’s not as if we didn’t have a desire to [cover those topics more in-depth]. We just run out of linear bandwidth,” Todd said in the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast.“Meet the Press Reports” is part of a larger trend at NBC News — as well as other TV news organizations — to make streaming more of a centerpiece in their strategies, rather than a supplement to traditional TV.“When Peacock consolidated everything, they don’t have someone separate trying to find TV shows for the broadcast [network] and then TV shows for Peacock, right? It’s the same. We’ve got all these platforms, but it’s one entity. The news division is now moving in that direction,” Todd said.

The wave of media consolidation is cresting again. The latest example is BuzzFeed’s acquisition of Complex Networks. BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti and Complex Networks CEO Rich Antoniello joined the Digiday Podcast to talk about the deal.The conversation with Peretti and Antoniello ranged from how Complex Networks will fit inside BuzzFeed to how BuzzFeed’s brands could cross over into Complex’s properties like ComplexCon and vice versa. What came through in the interview is how the two executives see their respective companies as being in a better position together rather than going it alone in an industry dominated by giant tech platforms and other major media companies that continue to merge.“In this day and age, how difficult it is being an independent publisher, I think it’s only gotten more and more difficult and the pandemic heightened that,” Antoniello said.Becoming a media conglomerate comes with complexities, though.“You can tell in companies that merge everything together and have some chief content officer who makes every piece of content the same -- I mean, it just doesn’t work,” said Peretti. “You need editorial independence and that flows through even to the business and to the partnerships you do and brand licensing deals and native advertising and branded content.”

As the chief data and technology officer at IPG, Arun Kumar has plenty on his plate at the moment. Apple is limiting tracking on iPhones and iPads. In less than a year, Google’s Chrome browser is supposed to cut off third-party cookies. And both Apple and Google are threatening the advertising industry’s adoption of the IP address as a cross-platform identifier.“’Stress’ is the middle name of my title right now,” Kumar said in the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast.What is stressing out the agency executive, in particular, is the question of how companies can connect with current and potential customers and keep a pulse on people’s interests when their traditional means of doing so are being taken off the table. In addition to the technology providers’ tracking crackdowns, government regulators and privacy advocates increasingly see the tracking that underpins much of digital advertising as a form of involuntary surveillance. And Kumar acknowledged that the advertising industry has not done enough to convince people of the trade-offs of tracking.“Is the industry doing a good enough job of explaining it? No, it’s not,” Kumar said.

A decade ago, Cornell students Jordana Abraham, Aleen Dreksler and Samantha Sage created a satirical blog called Betches to share their observations of student life. Now in 2021, the blog has become a multi-platform media company for millennial women that reaches a monthly audience —they tout — of 43 million.The blog grew with its audience, said Dreksler on the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast, allowing major life events for their audience to dictate new content verticals, podcast subjects and video series, including Betches Moms and Betches Brides. But above all, entertainment and humor led the company’s content strategy. As such, social media has become a key growth platform for the media company over the years.Like many media companies, Betches has had a lot to consider over the past year, including what its role would be on emerging platforms, how to continue serving its audience who was spending significantly more time online and how to create content for the ever-growing Gen Z demographic.